“Crowd,” a new and ambitious installation of collages by Fine Arts faculty member Thomas Lail, opened Friday, May 29 at Grand Street Community Arts (formerly Saint Anthony’s Church) on Madison Avenue at Grand Street in Albany.
Grand Street Community Arts is located at 68 Grand St. Please visit http://grandarts.org/ for more information and directions.
An illustrated catalogue of “Crowd,” with essays by artist and freelance arts writer, Amy Griffin, will be available at the reception.
Lail’s “Crowd,” slated to be on view for one year, consists of nine, large panels constructed for each of the street-level window niches in the historic St. Anthony’s Church. Made from thousands of pieces of paper cut in diminishing sizes, Crowd is Lail’s largest work to date in the Capital District. Each window panel is collaged with black and white reproductions of images of gatherings of people: crowds, protests and demonstrations, representing, as Lail states, “the accumulation of bodies that lead to utopian ideals or incremental change.”
Lail’s xerographic collage process includes enlarging, copying and re-copying his source images until all detail is obliterated and only a graphic, abstracted image remains. These copies are cut and collaged, layer upon layer into large scale abstractions. It is only upon observing the work both from a distance and at close range that the source images become decipherable and the latent content of the work becomes legible.
Though based in historic imagery acquired from archives, news sources and journals, Lail’s methodology results in images that, like the utopian experiments they picture, disintegrate into near illegibility and non-existence.
The dissolution of the image is not, however, entirely abject. Though communal utopias and protests are, by nature, short lived, they, like Lail’s images, persevere in bits and pieces, coalescing into new organizational groupings, new hopes, new crowds.
Published: Fri, 15 May 2015 12:14:08 +0000 by t.lail